TIFF Day 1: Score: A Hockey Musical & Gala Party

We arrived about 7pm to Roy Thompson, and headed to the Priority Line (because that is what our tickets said!), and stood for only 10 minutes or so till they let us inside. At which point we tried out a 3D TV, and then took a swanky photo of ourselves:

After we went in and found our seats, they showed the Red Carpet Arrivals on the Big Screen, and then TIFF was underway! They started with a brief film about the history of TIFF, celebrating 35 years, and brought a whole host of people on stage to thank various other people for various things. Eventually the Writer / Director (Mike McGowan) finally ended up on stage and brought out about 50 of the cast, including Olivia Newton-John, Nellie Furtado and Walter Gretzky.

The movie properly began about 9pm, and for the most part I enjoyed it. It’s a Sports-Musical RomCom, and it lives up well to the genre. I think the only negative press it might get is for being too Canadian! I think that something so in-your-face-Canadian almost always will be taken as a joke, but I don’t think that Mr. McGowan intended it to be that way, I think that we are so used to seeing American Lives being played out on screen, that we tend to think of it as self indulgent and crass when we put a Canadian face on it. A great example of this is when one character berates another for leaving her window open in the winter “Its not good for the environment” he says, to which she replies “I can’t turn my radiator off, David Suzuki”. It is exactly these kind of not-so-subtle references that will earn the movie both positive and negative press. I, for one, will be picking up his previous work, One Week, and think I will enjoy it as much, or even more!

TIFF Opening Night Gala Party
10:00pm, Liberty Grand.

We rode the streetcar, and got to the Party in record time! As soon as we got there, we saw our first Actual Celebrity: David Schwimmer, and I got my first Crappy Blurry Paparazzi Photo of TIFF10!

(It really is David Schwimmer, I swear!)

All dolled up, we checked out the rooms, ate some Hors d’Oeuvres and generally had a good time. There were basically three rooms for the lowly un-VIPs (while all the Very Important People were upstairs), a room with a giant ice rink ice sculpture that had Vodka Shots on it at the beginning of the night, a Courtyard was was serving do-it-yourself Poutine in little Chinese take-away containers, and a Club Room with a hockey-rink dance floor and DJ. Crazy!

(See all the photos on my Flickr Set, link at the bottom of this post)

We spent most of our time in the room with the ice sculpture, because that is where the Diet Coke people were, mixing up my favorite drink of the night:

Talked about other peoples dresses, and how very much we wanted to see Keanu Reeves on the balcony, sullenly eating a sandwich, but it was not to be. Eventually the servers were coming around with desserts (frozen chocolate-covered cheesecake hockey pucks on a stick and funnel cakes), and a while after that I realized there we barely any other people left, we got our coats and left.

Free snacks eaten. Free booze drunken. A great ending to a great start to the festival!